Portable wireless terminals such as mobile phones have been developed to have more and more functions, for example not only the telephone function, the electronic mail function, and the function of access to the Internet, but also the near-field wireless communication function, the wireless LAN function, the GPS function, the TV-viewing function, the IC card transaction function, and the like. In addition, in cellular communication, as a technique for achieving a high-speed and high-capacity wireless communication system, it can be expected to provide spatial multiplexing transfer (MIMO: Multi-Input Multi-Output) for performing communication by using a plurality of antennas on the transmission side and the reception side. In this technique, the spatial multiplexing is performed by transmitting the same signals which are space-time coded from a plurality of transmission antennas in the same band, and information is extracted by receiving and separating the signals through a plurality of reception antennas. Thereby, the transfer speed is improved, and thus it becomes possible to perform high-capacity communication. As the number of functions thereof increases, the number of antennas mounted in the portable wireless terminal tends to increase. Thus, there is a serious problem in that degradation in the antenna performance is caused by coupling between the plurality of antenna elements.
On the other hand, from the viewpoint of design and mobility, it is desired that the portable wireless terminal has a further small size and is highly integrated. In order to maintain favorable antenna characteristics while achieving reduction in size of the device, it is necessary to study arrangement of the antenna elements and coupling between the antenna elements in various ways. Further, a high-performance antenna system, which is subject to the coupling degradation countermeasures by reducing the number of power supply paths and the number of antenna elements as much as possible, is required.
As the existing portable wireless device coping with the problem of the coupling between the antenna elements, for example, as disclosed in PTL 1 and NPL 1, there is a known configuration in which low correlation between antennas is achieved by connecting the power supply sections of the array antenna elements through a connection circuit inserted therebetween so as to cancel the mutual coupling impedance between antennas.